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Frameworks5 and Libplasma2 Hacking in the Mountains

Randa Retraite

Starting this weekend, KDE e.V. the organisation supporting the KDE community organizes a number of meetings in Randa, Switzerland. Randa is a village in the Swiss Alps. It’s a bit of a remote location between mountains which reach up to 4500m, provides the perfect location to sit down together and do nothing but concentrate on a single topic. You can help us to make this happen, but first, read on to understand what we will be doing in Randa, and why.

From Platform to Frameworks

One of the meetings planned there is the meeting of the KDE Plasma team. The goal of this meeting is to plan and make progress on the port of libplasma, the framework that is underlying the Plasma workspaces to Qt 5 and KDE Frameworks 5.

Within the KDE Frameworks 5 effort, the KDE team splits up and reorganizes the whole KDE platform. This effort has been started during last year’s meeting in Randa, and while being a huge effort, we have already made good progress across many of the libraries and technologies that make up KDE Frameworks. KDE Frameworks 5 will be mostly source-compatible, meaning that no large rewrites will be needed in order to port an app to Frameworks 5, much rather, we’re splitting dependencies differently across the board to make it easier to reuse only certain frameworks, without having to drag in larger dependency chains. The Frameworks 5 effort goes along with porting of the codebase to Qt5 (which is also much more painless than the port from Qt3 to Qt4). The result will be a faster, more modular, and hopefully due to these new virtues more widespread use of KDE technology.

The road to Plasma-Next

One of the technologies in Frameworks 5 is libplasma2. For libplasma2, there is still a lot of work to happen. While we have a rough plan what we want to achieve, and already taken the first steps to make this happen, there’s still a huge mountain of work ahead of us to create a new libplasma2 that is worthy its place in Frameworks 5. One of the high-level goals is to be able to run Plasma workspaces (and apps) in an entirely hardware-accelerated environment. In Qt5 terms, this means we want to use QtQuick 2 to display our user interfaces using an OpenGL scenegraph. As that is quite a deviation from the current, QPainter-based approach, you can imagine that it won’t be easy to get this “just right”, and in any case, it involves touching and testing a lot of code that works well right now. Also for Plasma Addons, we want to achieve almost source compatibility, so all the work that has gone into Plasma in KDE SC 4 will be immediately available in the new world order of Qt5. Not an easy task, and there are a few areas where we don’t have satisfactory solutions yet. A lot of sweat and braincycles will be needed.

The good news is that we have a capable and motivated team to tackle this effort, and to really kick off our libplasma2 hacking spree, we will sit down in Randa and plan all this through in detail, then sit down and get hacking so we have hopefully reached a critical mass to continue on, and a clear and shared vision across the team how we want to go about the remaining work.

How you can help…

Free Software is a joint effort, and everybody can pitch in. In order to get travel costs funded for this event in the Swiss Alps, we have started a fundraiser campaign. The goal is to raise 10.000€, and we’ve already made good progress towards this goal. You can help reaching it, making the sprint in Randa possible and contribute to the future of the software you might (or might not yet!) be running!

This entry was posted
on Wednesday, September 19th, 2012 at 17:06 and is filed under English, KDE, Plasma, Qt, Travel.
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2 Responses to “Frameworks5 and Libplasma2 Hacking in the Mountains”

I hope the more modular KDE Framework will make it possible to install Dolphin under Unity/Gnome without having to install the full KDE-Libs. Since Nautilus is going to loose many important functions I’ve already replace it with Dolphin. And Dolphin is really great!